Cambodia

We are now home--and have been very remiss re this blog.  Good excuse, though.  At least an excuse of sorts.  We left Bangkok at 0540, that's  5:40 A.M., on 13 April and underwent 18 hours of flying time from there to Orlando with intermediate stops at Tokyo and Minneapolis.  It's taken a long time to get back in the swing of things timewise.  Plus there was a mountain of mail to go through and several medical/dental appointments to take care of, etc., etc.  So, we're back, and here's a little rundown on the cruise after Saigon.  The first stop was Sihanoukville, Cambodia.

At one of the Sihanoukville temples.  This guy was a little young to be selling, but his big brothers and sisters weren't. And a standard mode of family transportaion was one of these.

Sihanoukville wasn't really much of a town but a couple of the temples were interesting and in the trash dump near one of them I found several counterfeit $100 bills. The workmanship was great, but they were a tiny bit smaller than real, so I wonder if any made it into circulation.  The temples were interesting and were populated by a batch of young monks and hordes of childrem selling stuff.  Many were kinda cute, but they were very aggressive, as were all the vendors we found almost everywhere we went, and it was hard not to become an "ugly American" in your treatment of them.  Aside from the temples, the big attractions were the snake house--and I hate snakes--, monkeys at roadside, and the market.  Seems that all these places have their markets, and in them you can buy almost anything from dry goods to appliances to fresh seafood and every thing in between.  Here are some shots of the place.

The next stop after Sihanoukville was Bangkok, but we were there only a few hours before we got on a plane to go to Siem Reap, in Cambodia, the town adjacent to the  temple area where Angkor Wat is located.  It's a fairly large city with a mess of hotels that have been built relatively recently to accommodate tourists bound for Angkor Wat.  Here are a few ramdom shots of Angkor Wat.  There are five towers, or whatever, and it's a big deal to take a  picture of the temple from across the pond so you can get the reflection of all five.  It's hard to describe the stone carving within the temple ara, so I won't try.

The carvings below depict various periods of upheaval within Cambodia of the past.  These carvings extend all the way around the four sides of the temple. They are truly amazing.

After Angkor Wat and a bunch of other temples, we went back to our hotel and an evening entertainment at dinner.  Next day we went out to the big lake where there's a floating city.  A few stores, a couple restaurants, and even a catholic church. 

Back in Bangkok we took a final tour with two other couples who had been on the cruise with us and saw the five ton gold budda and the sleeping budda and the emperor's palace and all that good stuff.  Must admit that by the end of that day, we were pretty much templed out--and ready to come home.

The gold budda and the sleeping budda followed by some of the very ornate structures in Bangkok's royal enclave.  Finally, a shot of our hotel's lobby from the fifth floor, where our room was.  That royal area was truly overwhelming, just one fantastic "building" after another.  To enter many of these places you had to take off your shoes.